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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

DJB > Kaminsky

DJB has some of the best cryptographic implementations out there while Kaminsky's only interesting work is actually someone else's (CVE-1999-0024).

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DJB's sha1 code won the Engineyard sha1 contest back in 2009. His code was 14 times faster than OpenSSL's sha1. They were testing 3,079,431,974 hashes/second.

http://cr.yp.to/nearsha.html

http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/sha-1-challenge.html

That's far from the only speed record he's set; among other things, he's also held the record for the fastest AES implementation and the fastest FFT.

For the record, I thoroughly doubt I was the first person to find that poisoning bug.

I sure as hell wanted to be the last one.

(I'm much prouder of getting DJB's fix in, than I am of finding the bug in the first place. The former took two days. The latter took six months, and convincing people DJB was right. Only now do I understand what sort of a hurdle that was.)

I'm no big Kaminsky fan, but Paketto Keiretsu is freaking awesome. A collection of simple tools, but all great ideas.

How about criticizing the article instead of the person? Hero worship gets us nowhere.

This is one person saying another person's claims about DNSSEC are not credible, in part based on benchmarking done in private. One of these people is a cryptography of world renown, the author of the mainstream DNS server with the single best security track record, and the holder of multiple crypto and encoding speed records. The other is a security researcher. Both are speaking in an area of claimed expertise. Their background is extremely relevant to evaluating their claims.

so?

I don't understand how Kaminsky gets more attention. His "answer" to DJB gets attention in HN while the original presentation barely gets any. People will probably walk out with a very biased opinion.

well, if true, then that is a problem of HN, not DJB or Kaminsky's.

but I think you have wrong metrics for "attention" or "relevance" in the first place.

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